We are all mothers,and we have that fire within us,of powerful womenwhose spirits are so angry, we can laugh beauty into life and still make you tast… - Abena Busia

For we are not tortured anymore; we have seen beyond your lies and disguises, and we have mastered the language of words, we have mastered speech and know we have also seen ourselves raw and naked piece by piece until our flesh lies flayed with blood on our own hands.

Well, you did it very well, I must confess . You do succeed in bringing us along. To the point where I am about to send your novel to somebody facing that dilemma. Because it’s not easy on either side. And to be honest, yours was the first thing I read that made it so clear how difficult it was, but at the same time humanised the process both from the point of view of the person transitioning as well as the point of view of the people receiving them. Her grandmother’s responses, the point where her grandmother says, “Look, love, I was born in the 1920s” or whatever it was, you know, “You do your thing but it’s too late for me, I’m a hundred, take it or leave it!” (APAB and BElaughing) “I love you anyway, you can come to the farm but that... I’ve got other things to fight!” Which was also very [much] to the point. Her grandmother had had different things to negotiate, generations of displacement, fatherlessness or in her case, a father who didn’t get it, and looking for her daughter for seventy years. So, again, the complexity of the stories that get bound up in this vision of “This is who we are and need to understand”.

Dreamers remember their dreams when they are disturbed;And you shall not escape what we will make of the broken pieces of our lives.